• The couple who gave the San Francisco Bay Area’s last tract of virgin redwoods to the American people, asking Teddy Roosevelt to designate the gift Muir Woods National Monument.
• The penniless immigrant who escaped persecution in Europe, made his fortune in Kentucky, and built a park where people of every race and religion would be welcome.
• The quirky Maine governor who failed to convince his state legislature to protect Mt. Katahdin, and so bought it and the surrounding 200,000 acres himself, singlehandedly creating New England’s largest wilderness area.
• The Microsoft co-founder who made a crucial, last-second gift to save a threatened forest.
• The two grad students who started a land trust, hit up their friends for donations, and established a wildlife sanctuary on the eastern Colorado prairie.

Wildlands Philanthropy (October 2008) celebrates natural landmarks across the Americas and around the globe—glorious strongholds of wild beauty given to future generations by extraordinary people who simply loved the land.

These unsung American heroes, and thousands more like them, saved nature the old-fashioned way—
by buying land, and preserving it forever.